Commander in Chief

Partisanship, Nationalism, and the Reconstruction of Congressional War Powers

By: Casey B. K. Dominguez

Narrated by: Nancy Peterson

The constitutional balance of war powers has shifted from Congress to the president over time. Today, presidents broadly define their constitutional authority as commander in chief. In the nineteenth century, however, Congress was the institution that claimed and defended expansive war powers authority. This discrepancy raises important questions: How, specifically, did Congress define the boundaries between presidential and congressional war powers in the early republic? Did that definition change?

Casey Dominguez's Commander in Chief systematically analyzes the authority that members of Congress ascribe to the president as commander in chief and the boundaries they put around that authority.

Dominguez shows that for more than a century members of Congress defined the commander in chief's authority narrowly. But in a wave of nationalism during the Spanish-American War, members of Congress began to argue that Congress owed deference to the commander in chief. They also tended to argue that a president of their own party should have broad war powers, while the powers of a president in the other party should be defined narrowly. Together, these two dynamics suggest that the conditions for presidentially dominated modern constitutional war powers were set at the turn of the twentieth century, far earlier than is often acknowledged.

©2024 the University Press of Kansas (P)2024 Tantor

A fascinating, illuminating, and important book!

Casey Dominguez's important new book provides valuable insights into Congress's historical role in interpreting, circumscribing, and expanding the president's powers as commander in chief. She advances a thought-provoking argument supported by abundant evidence that the Spanish-American War in 1898 was a turning point when it came to war powers and the emergence of the modern presidency. The book offers rich and impressive historical analysis as well as a wealth of insights on the roles that constitutional interpretation, partisanship, and more played in the evolution of congressional views on critical questions of war, peace, and presidential power from the American founding until the start of World War I. The chapter on battlefield emancipation and Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation is particularly fascinating. A terrific book for anyone interested in American constitutional history, the evolving roles of the president and Congress, and the crucially important topic of war powers!